This news comes at a great time since we are about to release a milestone build of our 4.0 release of ExtremeTransactions that includes support for precisely this API. Thank you Cesare Pautasso for co-authoring this work, and thanks to all the reviewers for the very useful comments that helped us improve the design even more!

The recent announcement of Apple’s cloud illustrates yet again that a new era is about to start: that of the cloud - and with that, the massive adoption of service oriented architectures (SOA).

This will have an impact so huge that it is hard to underestimate. Some of the obvious changes that will happen are most likely the following:

Infrastructure (operations) will become agile - at the expense of IT jobs in operations. Applications will be deployed with unprecedented ease and speed. This is because the cloud infrastructure will transparently allocate the resources that now are allocated by human administrators.

SOA will become mainstream. This is because even the most common infrastructure services will be virtualized, running in the same or a different VM from the application, and scaling up and down as needed.

The interesting part - at least to us - is that transactions will become more distributed than ever. We are ready for this change - are you?

Atomikos has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the Cool Vendors in Application and Integration Platforms, 2011 report by Gartner, Inc. “We are greatly honored to be included in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner. We believe it is further validation that our “J2EE without the application server” message is resonating and gaining traction. As market adoption of lightweight Java containers increases, interest in solutions such as Atomikos ExtremeTransactions rises in parallel. We are seeing increasing market interest in our technology and in our app server free approach – particularly within transaction-centric industries such as financial services, telecommunications and transportation sectors,” says Guy Pardon, CTO, Atomikos.

It’s time for Devoxx again, and we’re going too (although we don’t do booths any more). Guy Pardon will be around on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning so if you want to meet there, feel free to say hi

If you look at the release notes then you will see that there are not that many new features (besides bug fixes and some important performance tuning). So what makes these new releases big news then? It’s our new release process and build infrastructure that made them possible.

That’s right: we have a new build process. We are now officially using maven and mercurial for our builds, instead of ant and svn. Also, we have tuned our repository architecture to better match our business model: we are now tuned towards more frequent releases of ExtremeTransactions and optimized even more for our support business.

So we hope you enjoy the new releases as much as we do! Beware though: they are milestone builds, meaning they are bound to have minor issues still. This is mostly due to initial imperfections in our new build process. After all, it _is_ a new way of working for all of us!